Total situational awareness since 2004.

August 31, 2011

What Makes For A Good Bad Review?

By Isaac Butler

(Updated Below)

I tweeted and facebooked and social networked about this earlier, but if you haven't read it yet, Jason Zinoman's NYTimes blog piece on the value(s) of bad reviews is well worth your time, as is George Hunka's response over at his place, where George writes (in part quoting himself in the comments to Jason's post):

“It’s not so much a matter of whether a critic who gives a bad review to a show has a vendetta or seems to engage in abuse. It is, however, a matter of whether or not the reviewer has the thoughtfulness or the knowledgability to render such a review valid. Especially with plays that seek to extend the form, the critic should be able to differentiate between a bad play and those which do not yield their pleasures as easily as others.” The contentious and rude review often enough calls attention to itself and the reviewer, not the play and the artist, which does a disservice to reader and artist alike. It also might serve as a cover for ignorance.

Here's where my ever-evolving thinking on critics and reviews stands right now.

Argument. First and foremost, a review is a work of argumentative writing and as such the common ways that we think about argumentative writing are helpful here. A well written review should have some kind of central argument that can be proven using the available evidence of the "text" (which in this case is the show that's being reviewed). It doesn't need to follow the formal rules of an argumentative essay, obviously. Who would want to read a review written in the keyhole format?

But at the end of the day, the reviewer is putting forward an argument about the worth of something they have seen. And so if we want to evaluate the quality of a review, we should be able to apply most standards of argumentative writing to it. Does it use evidence to support its points? Is it well structured? Is there a clear and needing-to-be-proved thesis at its core? Etc. As someone who reads a lot of reviews, lemme tell ya, you'd be surprised how many of them fail as basic works of argumentative writing.

Intent. So let's talk for a moment about what the review should be evaluating in the first place. It seems to me that the most obvious place to start is with the work's intent. Keeping in mind that the reviewer is not psychic, their first job is to try to divine the work's intent from what they have seen. You might never end up describing this intent to the reader, but without having some idea of what you think the intent is, there's almost no way to evaluate the rest of the piece except by raw standards of "taste," and that is one of the places that issues of fairness can sneak in.

The second part of divining the intent of a piece is figuring out whether or not you think that that intent is worthwhile. It could be that the reason why something doesn't work (for you!) is that it's intent is antithetical to what you think theatre should be. Or offensive. Or not achievable. Or a waste of time. If you believe this then it really is on you to make this clear and make an argument for why on such a basic level you reject the work. Perhaps you are tired of seeing plays about upper middle class white people and their problems and thus Rabbit Hole isn't for you. Then you have to make this clear (as David Cote rather colorfully did in his review).

Spider-Man1.0 provides an interesting test case here. As Jason Zinoman pointed out in his Slate.com review, what's most interesting about the piece is the intention-level fight about what Spider-Man is about. And in the case of Spider-Man, that was actually a far more interesting thing to write about than how much the music sucked.

Another reason why thinking through intent is important is that there are many, many different kinds of theatre. Theatre is a medium, it isn't a genre, and applying one genre's rules of quality universally is going to get us all in a lot of trouble. To use books for a moment, the things that make a mystery by George Pelecanos good are not the same things that make a novel by Don DeLillo good are not the same things that make Pride & Prejudice good are not the same things that make His Dark Materials good. All of those works are trying to do very very different things and they accomplish them in very different ways.

Formal Properties. The next thing is figuring out whether or not (and how) the formal properties of the show support or undermine this intent. Formal properties here could mean a whole lot of things, from the quality of execution (staging, acting, design) to ways the text gets in its own way, to clashes between the production choices and the text etc. And it could be that there are aspects of a production that both support and get in the way, obviously.

For example, in Bengal Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo, every character except for the protagonist has a clearly stated thing that they want/need/are-trying-to-get over the course of the play. This in some ways helps serve the piece in that it turns the protagonist into even more of a victim; he has little power in the play and that's part of the point, so having things happen to him and having him be torn between other people's desires is important. But it also undermines the work because as audiences we naturally gravitate towards characters with clear superobjectives and thus what and who the play is about gets very muddy.

Similarly, to focus on production choices for a moment, the directing style of both Black Watch (which I disliked but was impressed by) and Unnatural Acts (which I really quite liked and was deeply moved by) is flamboyant and frequently movement-based in a similar way that's become somewhat trendy in post-Gross Indecency nonfiction theatre. At times this very active, somewhat-showboaty style supported the work and the work's intent. The costume parade in act one of Black Watch for example was a devilishly clever way to take you through a huge swatch of history in a very short, visually engaging period of time. The the gorgeous and moving opening and closing "photo shoot" tableaux that the actors move out of and into at the beginning and end of Unnatural Acts forms a lovely and moving frame for the piece that also helps emphasize the nonfictional nature of the event. Sometimes, however, directorial excess undermined the pieces. In both cases, they had penultimate loud movement sequences meant to be emotionally stirring that instead made me feel like I was being pounded into a kind of emotional submission instead of given space to respond to the work. (Coincidentally or not, Gross Indecency also has a penultimate expressionistic movement piece that undermines the emotional power of the work.)

Formally Outre Work. George's point above is an interesting one, and one well worth keeping in mind. However, there is a way that such a position can be used as an argument from authority to simply dismiss that someone thinks your work is no good. How often do we take a review to a bar and talk about how the reviewer "just didn't get it"?

Certainly, with work that seeks to (as George put it) "expand the form" there is some extra work involved for the reviewer, particularly with work that jettisons expected surface pleasures. The question becomes in that case, what else is the work bringing to the table? This gets us back to intent and quality of execution.

At the same time, work can retreat behind a kind of gnomic shield to such a degree that the author can claim that only they are sufficiently well versed in what they were trying to do to be able to judge its quality. This is basically a dodge by thin skinned people who don't like being criticized, and in their case they should probably just stick to doing plays int heir living rooms for an invited audience.

When you get a review where the reviewer clearly didn't get what you are going for, there's a kind of twin interrogative process that I feel needs to take place. The first it towards the review itself, which might be clearly written by a moron, or a vindictive malefactor. It happens. But you also have to interrogate your own work and ask if it really is reasonable that someone didn't get it. Sometimes it is.

I directed a play called The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist which is, at its heart, about storytelling and manipulation. As a result, it is constantly and deliberately frustrating your expectations for what storytelling should be. Amongst other things, no scene in the play ends in what you might call a "satisfying" way. The play constantly slams into walls, scenes get interrupted by other scenes, or by silliness, or by digression. It's structure is a lot more akin to a Flying Circus episode than to a normal play. That's part of its point.

So when we got a review saying that the writer clearly didn't know how to end a scene, my job as the director was to look at the production choices we had made and see whether we had not taken steps to make that sufficiently clear to the audience. I think honestly, in that case, the reviewer had certain formal expectations of what "good" and "bad" theatre were and applied them regardless of the work's intent and that lead him to this conclusion. But had I received a lot of notices like that, or quite a few people coming up to me afterwards and complaining about that, it might be a sign that I hadn't done my job right.

Fairness and Decency. So, to circle back to the argumentative writing thing... I think it's important, just as in argumentative writing, that we strive for fairness and decency. Which is not the same thing as being nice. If something is bad, it should be described as and called bad. And this also does not mean that one is never harsh nor cruel. You can be a fair-minded and decent person and still think that occasionally someone or something needs to be put on blast.

When I think of reviewers being unfair, I think less of critics I disagree with than with critics who are unnecessarily cruel and dismissive to work that doesn't deserve it. And to my mind, a garden variety play that you just don't really like doesn't deserve cruelty. The problem is this: cruelty is very, very entertaining, and one of the other things that reviews should be is entertaining to read. It's a difficult gravitational pull to resist. But I also think then that when one is deciding to pull out the knives, part of the argumentative weight then involves justifying it (to see this brilliantly executed, read Laura Miller's review of Chuck Palahniuk's Diary, a heroic pan if ever there was one).

Let's also not forget exactly how harsh we can be in our criticism of other people's work at bars, via e-mail, to our friends etc. It's a little bit hypocritical to get up in a high dudgeon about reviews committing some sin of cruelty when we ourselves say far worse to each other.

Word Count. Obviously, most of the reviews today have very little space to do any of this. So a lot of the above is about the process that goes into writing the review, rather than the review itself. Still, I feel that you can tell when a reviewer has done the work to actually consider a piece and when they haven't.

Dismissiveness. I still don't know how I feel about reading dismissive reviews. Sometimes I feel like "well, people are working hard and being vulnerable and getting paid shit, the least they deserve is your full attention and consideration." But then again, I also think about how many times I've seen a play and just thought "meh. I'm glad I don't have to come up with 200 words to say about it."

UPDATE: I was remiss in the above in not linking to David Cote's review of Rabbit Hole, which can be found here. Jeremy M. Barker weighs in colorfully and with great force on this whole thing over at Culturebot, elaborating on how the idea that the critics didn't get it (or lacked sufficient expertise to get it) is largely a dodge (and an infuriating one at that). It will shock no one to learn that I largely agree with him and hope that in the above section on Formally Outre work that that is clear.

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

It's really difficult to learn how to take bad reviews gracefully, and I still struggle with it. For my part, I try to take criticism that might be useful to heart. At least consider it, you know? It's generally pretty obvious when somebody has written a thoughtful bad review vs. when somebody is just an a-hole (and we know who those critics are.)

"It's a little bit hypocritical to get up in a high dudgeon about reviews committing some sin of cruelty when we ourselves say far worse to each other. "

Tony: Even if that's the case, it's still important for critics to work hard to try and understand the intent. It's rather difficult to divine the intent and i don't think critics need to be right, especially since what we have to judge is what's onstage, not a behind the scenes documentary. Moreover, when groups of people are making something, there often are many different intents or a different intent for the direction versus the playwright. And there's also the fact that artists themselves sometimes create work that is received in such a way that is actually better than the original intention. As someone who just wrote a book about horror movies, i can tell you this happens in that genre all the time. We review plays, not intents. That said, it's an incredibly important point Isaac is making for people who do what i do. That's because the difference between a fair review and an unfair one is quite often an issue of how deeply the critic considered what the artists were trying to do. As a whole and individually. Intent is a very tricky and problematic thing to figure out, and yet, it's one of those cases where my experience tells me what matters most is the trying.

This is really well said, and reads much better here than it was on my blog. At the risk of repeating the implication of Jason and David's comments, if the intent is laughably misunderstood by a reviewer, that is also the production's fault. It's our responsibility to be clear in what we're trying to do, from intent through production, and if the production is muddied, from too many cooks or not enough leadership, then the show should be taken to task for that.

When I see a play where all the actors are in the same piece, and where the production seems to support the writing, then I'm usually thrilled with the final product, even if it isn't something I'd normally love. When one, or more, of the artists involved is on a different page, it ends up looking a little like a toy with a price-tag on it - everything you see might be very colorful, but you can tell which thing you're supposed to pick off with your fingernail.

I love Cote's comment. It's so spot on. What I intend and what I end up with are usually quite different and I often feel like I don't truly understand what a play is about until much, much later.

There have only been a couple of critics who wrote about MilkMilkLemonade as a play about the body, which couldn't be further from my intention, but is very much what I came to understand as the play's main thrust. It was completely unintended, and it took me ages to realize, but there it is.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the "Intentional Fallacy," which has been an element of literature criticism for some time and describes some of the drawbacks of attempting to infer intention from a work -- or whether it's even possible to assess through intent. The best explanation is W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's 1954 "The Intentional Fallacy." It is in part a contribution to New Criticism's close reading, but still may be of interest to academics and cultural reviewers alike:

You'll note above that I discuss trying to figure out what the work's intent is, not the author's. That's intentional. While art is never fully made from the conscious mind, the work created is still trying to do something. And it's worth trying to figure that out when trying to discuss whether or not the work is successful.

@Jason, I agree that critics (and artists) should try to ask what a work is trying to do. I think that far too many critics leap over that step, and it especially shows with works written outside the eurocentric-male perspective. (Which is exacerbated by the paltry numbers of women and writers of color working as critics.)

However, I there is a common misstep when moving from asking what a work's intent is, to asserting what a work intended to be.

@David I'd slightly disagree. In my experience it's pretty rare for a writer to not be on the money about what a work intends to do. It's pretty common for them to be off about what a work actually does. Subtle but distinct difference.

@Issac I think another thing that doesn't get said often enough is some critics would do well to step away for a while. If dismissiveness and snark are the first things in someone's arsenal, than they should walk a way for a bit and recharge their batteries. It's healthier for them and for the form. I think the same holds true for artists, btw.

But there is something of a Modernist consensus that "form IS content, content IS form," as Beckett put it in writing about Joyce. But one needn't look only at Modernist literature for examples of this.

The metrical structure of the sonnet (since Isaac will be teaching poetry this fall, I might as well use this as an example) is a means of "forming" the content that lies within it. In a Shakespearean sonnet, for example the metrical form stretches and manipulates the raw feelings of desire and loss that make up its content: the expression becomes elastic enough in both its structure and its idea so that it's very hard to say whether the expression itself would be the same without the strictures of the sonnet form.

Your latter example isn't an example of form and content being the same thing-- which the Beckett quote gestures towards-- but rather that they interplay. I don't see how that actually contradicts Jeremy's point which was that form on its own isn't enough, is "empty."

If we took the Sonnet form and wrote one about buying Teddy Bears, it would no longer contain the "raw feeling of desire and loss that make up its content." The form of the sonnet does not possess the feelings that the content does, it shapes them.

No, of course not -- a sonnet about buying Teddy Bears wouldn't contain etc. etc., but that's to misread what I'm saying. WHATEVER the sonnet is "about," what makes one sonnet different from another is not merely its content, but the expression of that content, which indeed is shaped by the form. The question is whether the content is "self-aware," if we can call it that.

I don't recall any of my professors warning me about "empty formalism," by the way -- mainly because form and content are SO inter-related that to validate one at the expense of another is to give a poem shorter critical shift than its study dictates. But then I haven't been in a classroom in a long time, and maybe things have changed.

We might not. I will say that I do think I grow more aesthetically conservative re: form once we move on to the stage. Not saying that formal experimentation isn't allowed, or other forms are bad or anything like that. And I wanted to make this case ina longer post later, but let me just rough draft it now:

When someone is reading a formally thorny work-- or even let's not say that, but a work like a sonnet where really if you aren't focusing on the form you're missing about 50% of what's going on-- you have the luxury of controlling your own pace of readership. You can read the poem, re-read it, read some outside critical essays, revisit it, just focus on the rhyme scheme, whatever. You can really hunker down. Certainly, when I've read more experimental prose works, the time factor, the ability to reread an abstruse sentence five times until its meaning unlocks, is of great value.

On stage, you do not have that luxury. The audience is seeing something once. And in real time. Even film-- thanks to new distribution mechanisms-- doesn't have to deal with this problem.

And so this connects back to Jeremy's question about how educated the audience you are writing for needs to be. It could be that-- a la Foreman's program note in Lumberjack Messiah-- you're trying to provide them with an experience, not necessarily one that involves "understanding," and people should just get whatever they get. But if there is something to be understood, something that the audience needs to "get," it's worth tempering some of the obscurity of the piece in order to make sure that they get it. Otherwise, why bother doing it in the first place? Self-expression? That's what blogs are for! Theatre is about reaching an audience, and the interplay between production, text and spectator. And that may mean that certain outre gestures have a lower probability of being successful and that that should be considered when constructing a work.

There is a way that so-called experimental work can become its own scene as well with its own set of conventions. There was a time in New York where everything had video, performers with deliberately flat affect, dance breaks and not one genuine human concern in the entire work. And to me that is just as deadly-- if not, in fact, more deadly-- than something kind of conservative and old had. Because at least the conservative old hat stuff is about something beyond a desire to be accepted by your peers, and is satisfying (in ways that are problematic, don't get be wrong).

If you'll permit, by the way, I'd just like to add that my original comment about the Intentional Fallacy is just as appropriate to a work as an author. In the cases where we have a stated intent by the author for a work as well as the work itself, we might be justified in making a comparison (bearing in mind that artists notoriously are never sure what they're intending, as Josh suggests above). Otherwise, though, the critic is engaging in a bit of ESP -- hard enough to do with an individual, harder with a work of art, especially a collaborative work such as a theatre performance.

If, as Wimsatt suggests, the intentional approach to criticism is invalid a priori, then criticism must be based on something else, and there are other schools of criticism which dispense with the intentional approach, such as the New Historicists (like Stephen Greenblatt) and, yes, structuralism. They do set out to assess a work based upon social context or genre.

Trends in academia, especially in the study of literature, come and go like any other trends. You may be interested, Isaac, given your current profession, to take a look at a book called Professing Literature by Gerald Graff, which is a very entertaining and readable history of academic literary studies in America. And so far as critical trends go, T.S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, something of a masterpiece in its field I understand (and similarly very well written), is actually very pertinent to the means by which one critical paradigm is replaced by another.

I guess, George, I reject the idea that trying to define and figure out a work's intent (different from an author's) is a priori mistaken. I think-- at least when we're talking about reviewing theatre-- it's the place to start in one's thought process. It's the clearest and easiest gateway into considering form and structure, and it keeps the reviewer from focusing merely on their own taste and genre prejudices. I love Greenblatt. I love other schools of criticism and other ways of looking at work, I think there are ways to synthesize them without throwing anything overboard. You can consider intent and structure and context (David Foster Wallace talks about this in his essay Greatly Exaggerated which, as you might guess, is his own response to The Death Of The Author). I'm not a huge fan of authorial intent. You can describe what a piece does and is trying to do without trying to psychically read back into what the person who put fingers to keyboard meant to do. And I think this is where I differ from a lot of intention-based criticism. I don't think art is completely created by the conscious mind and thus it is the work, not the author, that maters here.

Thanks for the recommendation, I had heard about Professing Literature and hadn't had a chance to check it out yet.

I do accept your thesis that theatre is unique in that its temporal quality is immediate -- you can't back up a performance as you can a film, or page back to pick up a thread you may have lost -- but that's essential to the form itself. That does not mean, however, that this work can't be as challenging as an experimental text or film. It's not only a matter of know knowledgable or educated about a kind of art work the spectator is; this may be of much lesser significance of what an individual spectator brings to a performance in terms of personal experience, prejudice, open-mindedness to new perspectives, what-have-you. (In the case of the critic, this is slightly different, but the critic fulfills a different professional role than that of an audience member.) Directors like Foreman and Barker define the audience as a collection of individuals rather than a being that somewhat mysteriously becomes a thing in itself once the houselights come down, and so honor the spectator's own individual agency to experience and interpret. It's true that an audience at a live performance is unique in that a work is by definition a real-time communal event, but the theatre artist may be more interested in fragmenting that community than addressing it as a collective.

Like experimental art, any genre can be its own "scene," and traditional artists or those writing in one particular genre or another may be writing as much for the acceptance of their peers as for their audiences. I would suggest, however, that those who do so (and I'm not denying that these kinds of artists do exist) are in a minority, and that the entire field shouldn't be presumed to feel the same way.

Finally going back and reading these comments, I'm struck by how much a discussion of how criticism should work veers off into what are essentially artistic choices the understanding of which is then projected back onto the critic. The artist can never really choose their audience; the artist can merely choose how to engage the audience who shows up, which may or may not be successful in terms of what the artist intended (whatever that may be--considering that George and Isaac are artists and makes as well, I'll take it for granted that they operate with some intent when creating work).

At a certain point, though, all of this discussion risks ignoring the audience entirely. Are you suggesting, George, that a critic should not appreciate Barker's or Foreman's attempts to relate to their audience in addressing the piece? Here we have form and intent (stated or otherwise) deeply interrelated.

The problem with all this discussion, then, is it amounts to various schools of thought arguing about to understand, interpret, and critique work. That's all fine and dandy but has absolutely no relation to the practical issue of how reviewing in a popular context happens. If the original discussion revolved around the better practices of reviewing, and whether in practice many reviews are fair, just, or even accurate...well, we've wandered down a road where at best we're all representing partisan positions, not actually discussing how this stuff works.